This book constitutes a sociological, anthropological, and curricular inquiry into the factors surrounding high academic achievement rates of students in South Korea. Taking root in similar studies conducted around the exemplary nature of the Finnish education model, it explores the phenomenon of success in South Korea, uniquely connecting it to the scholarship and models for examining the recent shift in attention and popularity of Korean culture. The authors argue that Korean education or "K-edu" can also be studied and understood as a Hallyu and an exemplary form of education. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative studies spanning over 15 years, the authors advance understandings of Korean academic success beyond more generalized understandings of how Asian students learn and towards a holistic explanation for the case of Korea. As such, the book challenges the perception of Korean students as passive learners with a controlled learning culture and instead advocates the ways in which Korean students are leading a changing culture by utilizing all available resources and opportunities in the space of South Korea’s evolving ecological system of education. In addition, this book provides one explanation as to how students from East Asian countries achieve such excellent academic performance. A crucial exploration of the culture and growth of education systems in Asian countries, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in Korean education and Korean students’ academic achievement as an emerging inquiry for both Korean studies and East Asian Cultural Studies. In addition, this book will also be informative for scholars of comparative education, sociology of education, educational policy, and postcolonial educational research in the world.

This book constitutes a sociological, anthropological and curricular inquiry into the factors surrounding high academic achievement rates of students in South Korea. Taking root in similar studies conducted around the exemplary nature of the Finnish education model, it explores the phenomenon of success in South Korea, uniquely connecting it to the scholarship and models for examining the recent shift in attention and popularity of Korean culture. The authors argue that Korean education or "K-edu", can also be studied and understood as a Hallyu and an exemplary form of education. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative studies spanning over 15 years, the authors advance understandings of Korean academic success beyond more generalized understandings of how Asian students learn, and towards a holistic explanation for the case of Korea. As such, the book challenges the perception of Korean students' as passive learners with a controlled learning culture, and instead advocates the ways in which Korean students are leading a changing culture by utilizing all available resources and opportunities in the space of South Korea's evolving ecological system of education. In addition, this book provides one explanation as to how students from East Asian countries achieve such excellent academic performance. A crucial exploration of the culture and growth of education systems in Asian countries, this book will appeal to scholars and researchers with interests in Korean education and Korean students' academic achievement. In addition, this book will also be informative for scholars of comparative education, sociology of education, educational policy, and postcolonial educational research.

This SpringerBrief is an extension of the article "Parallelization: the fourth leg of cultural globalization theory" (Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 2021) by Dr. Björn Boman. The original article consisted of four main examples of parallelization, and has been expanded to include chapters on Korea, Russia-Ukraine, and Georgia. This book points to the relations between oppositely directed processes and the need for theoretical modelling of complex societal processes.

This book advances new ways of thinking about emergence and impact of Itinerant Curriculum Theory (ICT). Written by authors based in Algeria, Brazil, Chile, China, Estonia, South Korea, Spain and the USA, the chapters examine the opportunities and challenges paved by ICT in the struggle to open up and decolonize curriculum policies. The contributors show how ICT can help us to pave a new way to think about and to do curriculum theory and announce ICT as a declaration of epistemological liberation, one that helps to resist Eurocentric dominance. The chapters cover topics including, ecologies of the Global South, education discourse in South Korea, China's Curriculum Reform, and the history of colonialism in the Middle East. Building on the work of Antonia Darder, Boaventura de Sousa Santos and others, this book posits that the future of the field is the struggle against curriculum epistemicides and this is ultimately a struggle for social justice. The book includes a Foreword by the leading curriculum historian William Schubert, Professor Emeritus of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Chicago, USA.

This book revisits the 1970 Kent State shootings, also known as the May 4 massacre and the Kent State massacre, using a new approach of currere and psychoanalytic guided regression. Drawing on a variety of interviews with those who were present at the events or who have close connections to the aftermath, the author engages in what he terms a doubled currere. This includes weaving a description of currere and narrative work with the actual storytelling of the subjects in order to build bridges and positive meaning through allegory and through inquiry that honors the narrative and re-energizes the field. Using a combination of the interviews, analysis and synthesis, the book re-activates and re-vitalizes the events, crucially engages with the notion of alterity, and unpacks the singularity of the past in its distinctive complexity. Carrying themes of hopeful ambiguity, it demonstrates how positive change can be guided, and positive insights engendered. Constructing a new remembrance of these tragic events and offering a distinctive and unique study utilizing currere, it will appeal to scholars of curriculum and instruction, as well as psychiatrists, psychologists, and historians.

This book explores the formation of human capital in education, interrogating its social and ethical implications, and examining its role in generating policies and practices that govern curriculum studies as an academic field. Using an inquiry approach and offering an intellectual history of human capital theory through a genealogical methodology, the author begins by contextualizing the formation of the theory and explores its correlation with the history of imperialism. Tracing the concept of human capital from ancient slave societies to colonial empires, the book arrives at the modern formulations of the concept in education systems and explores its impact on curriculum and pedagogy in the digital age. Asking whether an approach that represented slaves, machines, animals, and property in its history is appropriate for forward-looking democratic societies, the author then uncovers crucial implications for educational equity and teacher development. Presenting a unique genealogy of schooling humans as economic resources and offering a descriptive and critical analysis of its impact on education as lived experience, the author excavates ideas and mentalities by which we think about modern schooling processes. This approach supports the intellectual development of teachers and offers a critical assessment of power-knowledge relations in curriculum studies. Discerning associations between the human capital theory of education and technological progress with implications for ethics in the digital age, it will be an outstanding resource for scholars and graduates working across comparative and international education, the history of education, curriculum studies, digital education, and curriculum theory.

This book enables Western scholars and educators to recognize the roles and contributions of shadow education/hakwon education in an international context. The book allows readers to redefine the traditional and limited understanding of the background success behind Korean schooling and to expand their perspectives on Korean hakwon education, as well as shadow education in other nations with educational power, such as Japan, China, Singapore, and Taiwan. Kim exhorts readers and researchers to examine shadow education as an emerging research inquiry in the context of postcolonial and worldwide curriculum studies.

This book investigates transcultural consumption of three iconic figures ù the middle-aged Japanese female fandom of actor Bae Yong-Joon, the Western online cult fandom of the thriller film Oldboy, and the Singaporean fandom of the pop-star Rain. Through these three specific but hybrid context, the author develops the concepts of soft masculinity, as well as global and postmodern variants of masculine cultural impacts. In the concluding chapter, the author also discusses recently emerging versatile masculinity within the transcultural pop production paradigm represented by K-pop idol boy bands.

The rise in popularity of South Korean entertainment and culture began and is promoted as an official policy of the Korean government to revive the country's economy. This study examines cultural production and consumption, glocalization, the West versus. Asia, global race consciousness, and changing views of masculinity and femininity.